Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday June 28, 2012 @05:15PM
from the read-all-about-it dept.

OverTheGeicoE writes "Former TSA Administrator Kip Hawley has been inthenews in recent months, talking about how the Transportation Security Administration is broken and how it can be fixed. Some of his TSA criticisms in the popular press seem to make sense. This seemed strange to me. Just last March he was defending TSA in a debate with Bruce Schneier in The Economist. Then, the very next month, he's criticizing his former agency as if he was on the other side of that debate to begin with. Why? I felt like I was missing something, so I decided to read his book to find out more about his position. The title of the book is Permanent Emergency: Inside the TSA and the Fight for the Future of American Security, and it is co-written by Nathan Means." Keep reading for the rest of OverTheGeicoE's review.

Permanent Emergency: Inside the TSA and the Fight for the Future of American Security

author

Kip Hawley and Nathan Means

pages

260

publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

rating

6

reviewer

OverTheGeicoE

ISBN

978-0-230-12095-2

summary

An inside look at TSA from its former leader.

The book is partly a memoir of Hawley's involvement with TSA, which predates his appointment as its administrator. Hawley helped architect the TSA shortly after it was first authorized. He left government service once that was finished, but came back again in 2005, appointed by President George W. Bush to become TSA's third administrator in four years. He stuck with the job until the exact moment Barack Obama was sworn in as President in January of 2009. If you're looking for insight into TSA's most controversial policies, the extensive use of body scanning and pat down searches, you won't find that in this book. Those policies were put in place by Hawley's successor almost two years later. The phrase 'body scan' is used exactly once.

The book breaks from the memoir style at times and changes to that of an action-suspense thriller. It is interwoven with segments of prose similar to a Tom Clancy novel. In these segments we learn about the life, and possibly the ultimate death, of an Al Qaeda operative who goes by multiple names throughout the course of the book. Raised in Austria, we follow the terrorist through training with Al Qaeda in Pakistan and his connection with various airline-related terrorist plots against the United States. Under Administrator Hawley, TSA uses all its intelligence resources to track his moves and act to thwart the terrorist's nefarious schemes.

The Clancyesque sections are a severe weakness of the book, bordering on laughable at times. For example, there's a description of a Casio watch that reminded me of a Dave Barry parody of Tom Clancy. The action-suspense writing style also tends to over-dramatize and exaggerate TSA's actual accomplishments. The intelligence sources TSA uses all belong to conventional intelligence agencies, both US and foreign. The event leading to the most dramatic moments of the book, the disruption of a liquid bomb plot, was the work of British intelligence and law enforcement in the UK. The authors describe in great, suspenseful detail that while the British are rounding up actual Al Qaeda cell members, TSA in the US is waging war against an entire phase of matter, one that covers about 70% of Earth's surface. Thanks to their determined efforts, TSA was able to ban liquids from carry on luggage literally overnight. However, in this and all other terrorist plots covered in this book, the authors never offer any evidence that TSA's use of its borrowed intelligence ever allowed TSA to disrupt any specific, credible, and imminent threat. So, if you like the idea of a Tom Clancy book where the Jack Ryan character agonizes over intel a lot but never actually does anything of provable value with it, this may be the book for you.

Although the writing style was problematic at times, it didn't totally undermine the value of the book. It helped me understand why mainstream media is so accepting of TSA. During Hawley's tenure, TSA made strong, successful efforts to woo the press, including interviews with CBS' 60 Minutes and appearances on Oprah. The good relationship established during Hawley's administration apparently continues to this day, despite the dramatic changes in operations imposed by his successor. The book also gives an amusing mini-bio of TSA's 'Blogger Bob' Burns, who has been called 'the Tokyo Rose of the modern age' for his defenses of TSA under John Pistole.

I've often wondered why TSA seems so unresponsive to the American public, and this book offered me a plausible explanation. Hawley seems to view TSA almost exclusively as a weapon in the US war against Al Qaeda. When TSA implements policies that seem crazy or ineffective to the rest of us, it doesn't use outside opinions to judge the effectiveness of its policies. Instead it uses information gathered from the intelligence community unavailable to outsiders. A policy change is considered effective if Al Qaeda reacts in a desirable way. For example, if a TSA operation deploys VIPR teams at public transportation centers and suspected Al Qaeda operatives leave the US afterwards, the operation is considered successful.

This book also helped me better understand Hawley's recent press comments. It sounds as if Hawley is saying that TSA's most controversial policies can be terminated if intelligence shows Al Qaeda to be on the decline. Now that he is outside TSA, Hawley seems to see what the American public does, and sees a reason to change security. If intelligence shows an increase of Al Qaeda activity, security can be raised again as needed.

This understanding of how TSA works is also confusing. What we're actually seeing from TSA is an expansion of their activities in recent years, with no meaningful or significant easing of its invasive passenger screening being proposed. Could that mean Al Qaeda is actually on the rise in some way not obvious to the general public? If not, Hawley's successor is a real bungler, and I would expect Hawley to call him that when given a chance. Instead, Hawley specifically refuses to second guess his successor at the end of his book, leaving me puzzled about how the US war against Al Qaeda is actually going.

Permanent Emergency is an interesting book. It certainly has flaws. The writing style is inconsistent and often unsatisfying. It is not entirely factually correct in many of its stories; TSA classifies a lot of information, and the authors admit to changing or concealing details for that and other reasons. The book does not attempt to tackle the most controversial aspects of today's TSA policies. Still, the book gives insight into how TSA was formed, what problems it was designed to address, and how it operates. TSA is so new, there are few sources of this type to examine right now, so any firsthand account is useful. I recommend this book to anyone concerned by TSA's operations, as it helps us understand how TSA became what it is now.

As one of the techies there as things were being created daily in the last days of the FAA/early days of the TSA, I should write a book of my own from the trenches. The view from above really didn't match what was actually happening in the training, and many of the problems we face now are down to just a few chance events from the early days that became embedded in methods.Such a chaotic time in my life, but worked with some of the hardest working people who were dedicated to the best job they could do (wi

It will be something low tech and simple, like 9/11 which was just an exercise in social engineering to gain control of the aircraft and then all you had to do was point the planes at the buildings as the planes via their, fly by wire systems, flew themselves.

Well, they've been crying wolf for quite some time now. Can't wait to see what slips through the net due to their negligence / power schemes; smart money would say it will be something new.

My money, smart or not, says nothing will slip through for the same reason nothing has slipped through since 911 -- there is nothing.

The way they crow whenever they "catch" some numbnut who can barely put one foot in front of another you would expect massive coverage of an actual terrorist being thwarted. But there hasn't been even one. Anybody even remotely dangerous - shoe/underware bombers - never hits domestic security anyway, always boarding the plane overseas.

A problem we're actually seeing in Minnesota. We have "tornado sirens". I put it in quotes because there is no actual standard for when they're sounded other than for a monthly test at 1pm on the first wednesday of the month.

Some jurisdictions sound them at the drop of the hat, when there isn't necessarily a tornado, but when the weather is bad enough where it *might* cause some damage. Others wait until an actual tornado is pretty much on top of you before sounding the sirens.

I have some of these near my house. I can barely hear them on a good day, due to distance and geography, and if the windows and doors are closed there is almost no chance of them getting my attention. If the wind is blowing enough to push the trees around then I have to go outside to listen for the sirens that would let me know that it is dangerous to be near doors or windows. Wonderful technology.

They are making air travel so inconvenient and humiliating so we'll all start taking the train. Oh yes, thanks to the machinations of the TSA and train lobby, soon we'll all be coasting along at 50 miles and hour. Crossing the country may take several days, but the scanners and body cavity searches will be history!

They don't need a bill. The TSA has already been patting-down and inspecting luggage at train stations. Also bus depots. And at the post office, unemployment center, mall, and during the recent Chicago summit (including yanking people out of cars so they could prform illegal warrantless searches). The SS seems to have time-traveled from the 1940s to the present day America.

They don't need a bill. The TSA has already been patting-down and inspecting luggage at train stations. Also bus depots. And at the post office, unemployment center, mall, and during the recent Chicago summit.

Methinks the "terrorists" are smarter than the DHS. Who would board a train to blow it up when it can be done much safer from a distance? Thousands of miles of unguarded track and hundreds of unguarded bridges make easy targets. Buses can be targets of roadside bombs.

No, the "terrorists" aren't the dumb ones. The American public wins that award. Watch for a false flag operation coming to a neighborhood near you.

I would apply the same process to this Train trip as I do to Airplane travel. How much time does it ACTUALLY cost, once you include (1) driving to the port/station (2) waiting upto 1 hour for your ride to arrive (3) the actual trip (4) waiting for your luggage at the conveyor belt (5) finding and paying-for a rental car on the opposite end (6) driving to your hotel.

Two years ago I did a lot of travel between Oklahoma City and Minneapolis, and I discovered that my coworkers who flew took almost as long as I did in my car. (10 versus 11 hours). I suspect this high-speed rail would have a similar result.

So I continued driving. And pocketed the ~$1000 I was paid for mileage. Basic Rule of Thumb: I will drive to my destination unless the trip is longer than one day.

Trains are a lot more convenient then aircraft. There's security theatre, but there's less of it. You typically don't have to show up an hour before your train leaves. Rail stations are also usually located in fairly densely populated areas, rather then way out in the boonies. It's actually practical to show up 15 minutes before the train leaves. You still have to park somewhere, but since rail stations also tend to be on mass transit lines you can generally park anywhere in the City (including right in front of your own personal house), leave an hour before your train leaves, and still make it.

And then for the next ten hours you can play on your computer, read a book, bone up on the info you'll need for your business meeting, etc. instead of trying to navigate traffic yourself. And there's none of that "turn off your personal electronic devices for a half-hour before take-off and landing" BS.

The problem in the US is that train routes just don't exist. To get from Cleveland to Detroit by train, for example, you have to a) go through Chicago (which is two states out of the way) or b) go through Canada. The most sensible route (via Toledo) just isn't there. I did an experiment to see how quickly you could get to OKC from Minneapolis and Amtrak's website was unable to tell me. Apparently you have to go through Arkansas and Texas because the only passenger line into Oklahoma is Fort Worth-OKC.

If the feds were willing to put some money into passenger rail, so that you could actually make these trips, and incidentally upgrade the main rail lines so the trains could go 80, it would be a really good thing for the country. We'd use less oil, be less vulnerable to terrorism, and we'd have more travel options. But that ain't happening anytime soon.

Well I suspect if we both left home at the same time, me by car and you by train, we'd arrive at L.A. about the same time. As for "reading" I listen to audiobooks while driving, so I don't consider it wasted time. There are tons of them: Escapepod, Dunesteef, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, etc. (And I'm getting paid for it.)

Your probably right about the tie if we did the rail system I mentioned. But I'd still have a major advantage because audio books are not cheap. If your boss is still paying you mileage and the mileage is actually cheaper then gas and wear on your vehicle; you probably come out ahead. But for a vacation I win hands down.

But if they did a system like the French made in the 70s my trip velocity would be more then 170 MPH. That's trip velocity, so in in five hours I've gone 850 miles, counting stops. It'll take you 9 hours to catch me, assuming your gas tank doesn't need re-filling and you don't get hungry.

There's a reason liberals read a Conservative say: "But with our low population densities trains are inefficient," and simply walk away. Montana needs 170 MPH transportation a hell of a lot more then NYC does.

>>>I'd still have a major advantage because audio books are not cheap.

Neither are the actual books you have to buy to read on the train. BESIDES we both know you don't actually need to pay for anything. Did you see the websites I listed? They are all free. (Also there's tons of radio podcasts and college lectures I listen to while driving... all free.)

>>>But for a vacation I win hands down.

I don't "vacate" often, but when I do I usually stay home and just enjoy the time off. My last

>>>I'd still have a major advantage because audio books are not cheap.

Neither are the actual books you have to buy to read on the train. BESIDES we both know you don't actually need to pay for anything. Did you see the websites I listed? They are all free. (Also there's tons of radio podcasts and college lectures I listen to while driving... all free.)

$8 paperbacks are a lot cheaper then any Audiobook I've seen.

CD Audiobooks in particular seem to cost as much as a full TV series on DVD.

>>>But for a vacation I win hands down.

I don't "vacate" often, but when I do I usually stay home and just enjoy the time off. My last major vacation was a drive across the states..... the drive was the whole point, and riding a train would have not been the same (looking at tall weeds growing alongside the track gets boring).

As for the claim of train travel across 850 miles in 5 hours... not true. You have to add another 2 hours for various stops along the way (dropping-off and picking-up passengers). Plus an hour to leave your home and drive to the station/check your baggage. Plus another 2 hours to find a rental car at the opposite end, go through their annoying checkout/payment process, and drive to your hotel for the night.

About 10 hours total. Same amount of time it took my coworkers who flew by plane across the same distance. In contrast my drive time was 11.

The French have 170+ MPH trip-speed. Actual train-speed is 200 MPH. So you've lost two hours. You're also being quite pessimistic in assuming that a) car rental is actually necessary, b) that it would take an hour, and c) that the Hotel would be 60 miles from the station.

Moreover I'm being pretty generous in saying you get 850 miles in 10 hours. That's 85 MPH trip speed,

You're discounting the risk associated with traveling by car. Though, of course, that risk isn't nearly as huge on the wilds of the Interstate as when you're close to a city. But it's definitely greater than traveling by train.

Also, I've gotten tons of useful work done on train trips. There is no way that's happening in a car if you're paying enough attention to drive safely.

Actually, Amtrak has priority over freight travel. The FRA was pretty lax in enforcement, but over the last 3 years things have improved substantially. Private rail companies / many states were getting away with murder for a long time there though... (e.g. building sidings that couldn't fit most freight trains... I used to loathe travelling through Virginia).

I would apply the same process to this Train trip as I do to Airplane travel. How much time does it ACTUALLY cost, once you include (1) driving to the port/station (2) waiting upto 1 hour for your ride to arrive (3) the actual trip (4) waiting for your luggage at the conveyor belt (5) finding and paying-for a rental car on the opposite end (6) driving to your hotel.

I think this is why many Americans don't want rail - they think it's just a slower airplane.

What's not obvious is that rail is (often) closer to where you want to go. As an example, when I was in Tokyo and took the Shinkansen (high speed train) to a neighboring city, we left the hotel about 30 minutes before the train was scheduled to leave, took the subway to the Shinkansen station, bought tickets, walked aboard with our luggage, left our wheeled bag at the end of the car, then 10 minutes later, the train left. When we got to our destination 2 hours later, we just grabbed our bag on the way out the door, and a 10 minute walk later we were at our hotel in the center of the city. Flying would have taken at least an hour longer, cost more, and would have been less convenient since we would have had to plan ahead and bought our tickets ahead of time so we would have missed out on the chance to spend the morning with a friend from the 'states that we unexpectedly ran into the night before. With the Shinkansen we knew that even if the train we wanted to take was full, there was another one 45 minutes later (and several non high speed train options to choose from). Trains don't often run at 110% capacity like airlines do - they don't have to overbook to break even.

The HSR between SF and LA is supposed to take around 2:30 in travel time. Add 15 minutes to get to the train in SF and 15 minutes to get from the train station in LA to where ever you're going, so that's 3 hours.

To fly, you'd leave for the SFO airport at least an hour before the flight (travel time is around 30 minutes with normal traffic), spend 1:15 in the air, and then you've got at least 45 minutes to pick up luggage and travel from LAX to Union Station, so that's 3 hours.

Plus in the train, you have more comfortable seating, Wifi (many planes have that now too) and better meals with real silverware.

Granted, if you're not going from city center to city center, travel times could be higher by train, but if the majority of travelers are going to/from the city centers, those people will find the train to be more convenient. And getting to the city center from other areas is also convenient. I don't know about LA, but in the Bay Area, if you live in Marin, you can choose to take a bus or ferry to downtown SF to catch the train. Or from the East Bay you can take BART or Bus or Ferry. Or if you're on the Peninsula, you can go to the SFO or Palo Alto HSR station directly, no need to go to downtown SF.

Comparing Japan trains to the U.S. doesn't really work. They are are much, much denser country. Hell they have inferior DSL for their internet, because they are so dense! (And yet still the 3rd fastest average speed in the world.) Just as DSL is not a viable option for far-flung, mostly-empty U.S. neither are trains. What works in Japan doesn't work here.

The only place dense enough is in the giant city known as the Northeast I-95 corridor (from Washington to Boston). That's about it.

Compare it with Japan in the 1960s or France in the 1970s when their first high speed trains ran. It was lower density back then but still viable, and the transport corridors have had some influence on density since.

Look: I don't want to ride an inconvenient train to work (or have to pay for it through gas/road taxes being diverted to train maintenance). I had the option when I was working near D.C. and could have rode the train like my coworkers, but it took them 1.5 hours! My car did the same job in only 45 minutes.

Look: I don't want to ride an inconvenient train to work (or have to pay for it through gas/road taxes being diverted to train maintenance). I had the option when I was working near D.C. and could have rode the train like my coworkers, but it took them 1.5 hours! My car did the same job in only 45 minutes.

The problem is that most urban areas don't have the space to accommodate more car traffic. in the SF Bay area, If the BART system shut down, CalTrans would need to build another multi billion dollar Bay Bridge just to accommodate the extra traffic from people that were riding the train. But the problem isn't just getting cars to the city - it's what happens to them once they get there. Bridges are (comparatively) easy to build, but adding additional traffic capacity to city streets is nearly impossible. A

They are making air travel so inconvenient and humiliating so we'll all start taking the train. Oh yes, thanks to the machinations of the TSA and train lobby, soon we'll all be coasting along at 50 miles and hour. Crossing the country may take several days, but the scanners and body cavity searches will be history!

Perhaps for the same reason known Soviet spies were not arrested; they're easier to watch.

The thinking goes that at any given time in a country, there are a fair number of spies from foreign powers. The naive approach is to arrest them, and deport / imprison them. The pragmatic approach is to watch them, see who they meet / what they are doing, because if they are officially caught, a foreign power will just replace them with new spies, who may not be discovered this time. Lots of exhaustive manpower, as it

Perhaps for the same reason known Soviet spies were not arrested; they're easier to watch.

But this is about when they leave the country.

Even if everything else is correct (and I find it difficult to believe that Al Qaeda has that many operatives who could fit into US society) what difference does it make when they are leaving the country?

You don't arrest them because then the enemy would know you've been onto them. Instead, you can use them for both collecting information and passing bogus information to the enemy. As soon as they are arrested, the enemy may change their tactics and disregard all the information you have fed them through the operative.

They probably have changed tactics (many times even), but not everything is aimed at the U.S. People forget that Osama's goal was to overthrow the Saudi monarchy (for several reasons, one of which was allowing U.S. troops). They attacked the U.S. when Osama concluded that American aid and military power was making his goal impossible.

Personally, I am not privy to the current plots of Al Quaeda inside the United States, so I can only really speculate, but assuming a terrorist force has some tactical flexib

It seems quite possible that "suspected Al Qaida operative" covers an extremely large group of people against whom there is only the flimsiest evidence that would never hold up in court. Then you can watch them but you have no reason to arrest them since, in all likelihood, only very few or none of the people you are watching are in fact Al Qaida operatives. The group is still very useful to watch because in a large group of some of them are going to leave the US each year and you can then use that to justi

So there are people we SUSPECT are Al Qaeda... but we're not going to arrest them when they try to leave the country.

I'm not entirely sure where you're going with this. Are you saying that the TSA should arrest people just because they suspect someone is involved in a terrorist organization? I suppose they should then beat this person until he tells them what they want to hear.

So there are people we SUSPECT are Al Qaeda... but we're not going to arrest them when they try to leave the country.
I mean, what possible information could they have that would be useful?

There are an infinite number of people you might suspect are Al Qaeda. If you can effectively harass them into leaving the country and call that a victory, you can have unlimited victories. If you arrest them and they turn out to be innocent, you can have an unlimited failures.
This is one of the problems with policies that target people who might do something wrong, instead of people who do something wrong. And it inevitably leads to corruption.

Emergency is peace. As long as there is an emergency, there are no terrorist acts. If we stop the emergency, the terrorist acts will happen again. So, if we stop the emergency, there will be no peace.

Of course, every one of those statements is wrong. The opposite statements are the truth. Hard to spot too. In fact, it's getting easier to doublespeak now than it was in the past. Orwell was ridiculously ahead of his time.

Emergency is peace. As long as there is an emergency, there are no terrorist acts. If we stop the emergency, the terrorist acts will happen again. So, if we stop the emergency, there will be no peace.

Of course, every one of those statements is wrong. The opposite statements are the truth. Hard to spot too. In fact, it's getting easier to doublespeak now than it was in the past. Orwell was ridiculously ahead of his time.

No, he was not. He was writing about what was happening in his own time and in his own place. The whole "1984 was about warning us about some possibility that could happen in the future" thing is terrifying to me. Orwell was writing about things he saw happening (or metaphores for those things). He set the book in the future so as to give someone a perspective on these things from an outsider's frame of reference. The idea was to make it easier to see it happening in the now, not to keep it from happening

However, in this and all other terrorist plots covered in this book, the authors never offer any evidence that TSA's use of its borrowed intelligence ever allowed TSA to disrupt any specific, credible, and imminent threat.

Which is pretty much about as surprising as the Sun coming up in the east to anyone with any knowledge of security. That's not how security measures work, or how they're meant to work, or anything but an assumption created of whole cloth by armchair experts.

I didn't double check the locks on my doors when I left this morning because I knew a specific burglar was coming to my door today - but because further up my semi rural road, their has been a string of break in's and closer down to me a car has been spotted prowling. Nor am I under any illusion that locks will stop someone determined - but they will deter the less determined. Simple, basic, bog standard security theory and practice.

A number of Australian articles about the farce of the TSA search and detection methods have been posted by scientific friends of mine in Australia, which point out what I and other people with counter-terrorism experience have long known - more than 80 percent of all the methods and techniques the TSA use are proven to not work.

Given that, and other objective evidence, reading a book on this subject would be best classified under Absurdist Comedy, or Satire.

The character of the untrained, uneducated "expert" with zero experience that somehow using inborn instinct is the best man for the job would be the perfect idol for a TSA clown.

I'm not sure what books that was out of but even Fleming's Bond was way more believable because he'd done things to become what he was. I got a very strong anti-intellectual vibe to the point of it even coming off as hating apprenticeships from Clancy.